In my previous post, I’ve commented on how hard it was to manually install Ruby on Rails. The easiest solution was to grab the 1-Click Rails Installer. However, 1-Click Rails Installer doesn’t come with the latest Rails or RubyGems version.

Updating Rails is a no-brainer: just use gem install rails and you’re done with it.

Updating RubyGems is easy as well, once you figure it out. If you try to start the server using updated Rails version but with outdated RubyGems, you will be told to update your RubyGems with the command gem update –system. This, however, doesn’t work. The two commands that will update your RubyGems are gem install rubygems-update, followed by a update_rubygems command. This will then remove the old version and install the new one. Starting the server afterwards will happily work and you’re ready good to go.

Apparently, this works on Mac as well.

Note: If you’re in Vista, you must start the command prompt as administrator. Under Mac/Ubuntu, use the sudo for both commands. I haven’t tried it on any other linux flavour so far, but I’m guessing that logging in as root will do the trick.

I’ve tested this when updating Rails from version 2.1.0 to 2.3.1 and RubyGems from version 1.1.1 to 1.3.4